Neil Young’s Pono to Launch in 2014

In Internet marketing we tend to be very visually oriented. Everything is read or seen or viewed. We measure impressions. We often act as if there are no other senses any more.

Enter Pono. This is Neil Young’s pet project to make digital music sound as close to the studio rendering that only the musicians themselves experience. Young has been working on the service and device offering that he claims will bring music back to its fullness. Young for years has bemoaned the advent of CD’s and all things digital music claiming that what consumers ultimately hear is only about 5-10% of the actual sound of the music that is created in a studio.

I’m very happy to bring you some good news. All of us at Team PONO have been focused on getting everything right for our early 2014 launch of Pono.

The simplest way to describe what we’ve accomplished is that we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality – as it was in the studio. So it has primal power.

Hearing PONO for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day. It takes you a second to adjust. Then you enter a bright reality, of wonderfully rendered detail.

This music moves you. So you can feel. That’s why so many musicians are behind PonoMusic – this is important work that honors their art. This is the way they wanted you to hear their music.

PONO starts at the source: artist-approved studio masters we’ve been given special access to. Then we work with our brilliant partners at Meridian to unlock the richness of the artist’s music to you. There is nothing like hearing this music – and we are working hard to make that experience available to all music lovers, soon.

Our mission is also to make PONO just as accessible as any music you buy and listen to today. So we’ll be launching both the PONO portable player – an updated version of the one I showed on David Letterman’s program – and an online library, with all your favorite music available in PonoMusic quality. Everything you need to feel music anew.

Stay tuned for more updates. And be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest information. We hope you’ll try PONO when it comes your way, and that it brings you the soul of music.

Yours, for PonoMusic –
Neil Young

So why is this being brought to you on an Internet marketing blog? Well, content is more than images and visuals. In fact sound can be one thing that cuts through the clutter of an increasingly loud marketing world. Just think about all the music that serves as the bed for TV ads. Oftentimes, it’s the sound of a familiar song that brings one’s attention to the ad itself.

Pure sound is powerful. Neil Young knows this. Maybe we should all be thinking about it as well.

What do you think?

James

It’s just Neil Young using clever marketing playing with emotional terms like “the soul of music”, “trapped music”, etc. in order to sell his music players, while taking advantage of the ignorance most “music lovers” will have for the actual science behind it. It’s similar to homeopathy in medicine: it works only if you believe in it, thanks to the placebo effect, but in reality, it’s just water. If you want to know the details (and before replying to this claiming I don’t know what I’m talking about), read this: http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html